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| The $25.20 Still Life, Oil on Canvas, 16x20" |
I tinkered away early this week on the $25.20 still life shown here. And in case you were wondering, while working on it I listened to WQXR, New York City’s only remaining classical music radio station. The kind of music you listen to when you paint is very important, and it is a question often asked of painters on the ascendant who are profiled in artists’ magazines. Who can paint in total silence today? I can imagine Vermeer must have done so, but maybe not Caravaggio. I’ve read that Rubens listened to Monteverdi CDs in his huge studio in Antwerp while he and his production crew were hard at work. Maybe my memory is faulty. Maybe Rubens actually had someone read from classical literature while he was painting. Anyway, silence is verboten in the studios of artists today. Wonder how Cezanne would feel about that? He angrily stopped working on the portrait of his dealer Vollard when he heard the faint barking of a dog a mile away. I hear all kinds of caterwauling on Broadway below the window of my 8th floor home studio on the fashionable Upper West Side of Manhattan. The worst was an eccentric lady who stood on the sidewalk behind her folding card table every day for a couple of months one summer, droning, at the top of her lungs, “Stop the abuse, sign the petition” for a couple of humanitarian causes you no longer felt so charitable toward thanks to her entreaties. She was a skinny, stern, scary looking lady, and maybe that’s why I never saw anybody actually sign one of her petitions. I have no choice but to carry on with my painting before the tomatoes rot. I’m not real keen on painting rotten produce. I actually think I paint better without musical accompaniment, but it sure helps drown out the noise outside.
From what I’ve read, I get the impression that most artists seem to prefer one kind of music to listen to exclusively while they go about painting their masterpieces. I’m pretty eclectic when it comes to the music I paint by, but I won’t listen to Monteverdi, dreamy symphonies, classical piano music, John Cage, modern operas, most forms of jazz, hard rock, hip hop music, or any other music without a discernable melody. WQXR is my go to source when I’m too lazy to drop in my cassette tapes of Rich Conaty’s Sunday evening program, “The Big Broadcast,” music of the 1920s and 30s, which he has hosted since 1973 on WFUV, the Fordham University radio station. The bouncy rhythms of that music are just right for cheerful painting, although some young adults who have posed for me can’t stand listening to it. Two 90-minute tapes on my old dual cassette deck take me right up to the end of my regular painting session. If I’m at my easel on a Sunday, I tune in to WKCR, the Columbia University radio station, to listen to Amazing Grace (Gospel), The Moonshine Show (Bluegrass) or The Tennessee Border show (Hank Williams, et al.), which takes me from 9 a.m. until 2 p.m., when I’m usually finished painting for the day. The problem with painting along with the aforementioned WQXR is you have to put up with all the annoying sales pitches from the hosts. The station is no longer a commercial radio station with advertisements, but it runs endless appeals for money from its listeners and frequent plugs for its “corporate sponsors” that sound just like ads to me. Many times, depending on my mood, I’ve painted along with tapes of such music as popular songs from the so-called “American Songbook,” folk songs, Edith Piaf, country western, Broadway musicals, opera and, my favorite, Gilbert and Sullivan comic operas. I’m very happy when I’m nearing the end of a good painting session at the same time that, for example, The Mikado is nearing its end with such triumphal phrases as “The threatened cloud has passed away...” and “With joyous shout and ringing cheer…” I can never quite bring myself to put down my brushes at the exact same moment that the music ends, regrettably. Gustav Rehberger (1910-1995), a popular drawing instructor at the Art Students League, used to widely demonstrate his Baroque-influenced technique to Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, putting the finishing touches on his flamboyant drawing in concert with the final passages of this stirring composition.
Now about that still life of mine. On Sunday morning I made my customary visit to the neighborhood flea and farmer’s market on Columbus Avenue looking for some locally grown flowers to paint. The couple who sell bedding plants and cut flowers had brought in some nice peonies in the late spring, but now they are selling uninspiring mixed bouquets with several kinds of little, spiky, colored weeds mixed in with two beautiful zinnias. The little stuff is hard to paint and I only wanted a nice big bouquet of farm-fresh zinnias. Why do they do this to me? So I moved on to the produce vendors. I bought the two white eggplants for $1.75 from one vendor and the two attached heirloom tomatoes from another vendor for $3.45, a little less than a pound, which is $3.80, as I recall. I don’t usually eat the fruits and vegetables I buy for my still life setups, by the way. Who knows how to prepare white eggplants and heirloom tomatoes anyway?
I meandered over to the adjacent flea market and came upon something that is very rare in that market -- a new vendor. He was a youngish retired chef from Rhode Island who now does the flea market thing in his home state, but was in New York for the first time because his market was closed for some reason or other. Maybe I should have asked him how to prepare the eggplants and tomatoes. I was surprised that he didn’t know the sweet little song “Rhode Island is Famous For You,” composed by Howard Schwartz, with lyrics by Arthur Dietz. Here’s a link to Blossom Dearie singing it in a YouTube clip: http://youtu.be/Ig2daWp-Pls. At any rate, the vendor accepted $20 for the green enamel pitcher and the pottery vase depicted in the painting.
I thought it might be interesting and appropriate to paint the lot together. So on Sunday afternoon I pulled out a couple of the many old and undistinguished cloth rags I keep stashed in my studio and spent half an hour pushing things around in an attempt to get the objects to relate comfortably with each other, a difficult task because they really don’t seem intrinsically simpatico to me. I did not enjoy the process. My patience is easily tested. The next morning I took a couple of minutes more to push things around until I finally gave up. I then spent Monday and Tuesday morning painting the $25.20 still life to the best of my limited ability, with a little overworking thrown in on Wednesday morning. I think the painting looks a little better than my lousy photograph of it, which shows too much glare and uneven lighting because I photograph my paintings using just one light source, the available light from my studio window. To compound the problem, the image became washed out when uploaded to this blog for some unknown reason. The color is pretty accurate, though. I was never inclined to master the proper way to take photographs of paintings using two light sources, which requires more open floor space than I have in my home studio. I paint with a lot of turpentine, so this painting needs to be varnished to even things out. I’m not sure I could sell this painting. I don’t think I would want to buy it myself.
The next day I quickly did another painting of the two eggplants with two old potteries over an old painting I scraped down a little and that one came out a lot better. But I don’t feel like dragging out my tripod again to take a picture of it, so that will have to be the “fish that got away” for the time being. How much can I trash my own work? Let me count the ways. I might be able to get $100 for this $25.20 still life, if I’m lucky, and if I don’t destroy it first. That’s a whopping $74.80 free and clear, if my arithmetic is correct. Who could ask for anything more?
